Director: Ridley Scott
Writers: John Logan, Dante Harper, Jack Paglen, Michael Green
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
Runtime: 122 mins.
2017
Can one consider Alien: Covenant in a vacuum? Half of the movie is a dogged continuation of the slapdash philosophical noodling that Ridley Scott brought to the franchise with Prometheus, and the other half is a herky-jerky course correction towards a more classic Alien styling. This is indicated first and foremost by the title, which hearkens desperately back to the original run of films. It is also indicated by Scott himself, this quote about the backlash to Prometheus coming to mind:
. . . we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They want to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: Wow, OK, I'm wrong. The fans, in a funny kind of way--they're not the final word--but they are the reflection of your doubts about something, and then you realize 'I was wrong' or 'I was right.' I think that's where it comes in. I think you're not sensible if you don't actually take [the fans' reaction] into account.It is strange to see Scott make such a boneheaded remark. Not only is it a shocking misunderstanding of his own work, but it's a misrepresentation of audiences' very valid complaints about Prometheus, of which lack of Xenomorph tended to be low on the list. I can only really grok this comment by assuming that Scott was being defensive and a bit petty about unfavorable responses to a passion project.
That pettiness worms its way into the DNA of Covenant, which trots out Xenomorphs with dutiful regularity. The now entirely CGI Xenomorphs (or Neomorphs, I think this iteration is called) are gratuitous. It's not that they don't fit the plot per se. It's that these Aliens swagger through the film like slasher villains. In fact, the Alien-heavy half of the movie behaves very much like a schlocky slasher, right down to the utterly disposable characters who make baffling choices and ultimately get dispatched whilst having sex in the shower.
